FOOD
Given Jews have lived continuously in the Middle East for 3000 years, it’s no surprise Israelis, the majority of whom are Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews, share cultural foods with other Middle Eastern cultures, including Palestinians. That’s not cultural appropriation. That’s simply the natural result of living in the same region. For example, there’s possibly a mention of hummus in the Tanakh, or the Hebrew Bible.
However, some of the foods decried as “Israeli appropriation” are uniquely Israeli. Israeli couscous, for example, is not actually couscous, but rather, toasted pasta balls invented by Mizrahim in refugee camps in Israel in the 1950s. Thanks to the 1948 war and Israel’s rapid absorption of over a million Jewish refugees in the span of a few short years, Israelis were subsisting off food rations, so they had to get creative.
Likewise, Israeli salad was invented in the kibbutzim in the late nineteenth century.
Other foods, though not invented in Israel itself, are uniquely Mizrahi or Sephardic, such as jachnun and bourekas. Meaning, while they originated outside of Israel, they were invented by Jews.
Other foods claimed as “Palestinian” were not eaten in the Levant until they were brought over by Jews, such as shakshuka.
Finally, over 20 percent of Israeli citizens are of Palestinian descent. As such, their cuisine has become an integral part of Israeli culture. Additionally, let’s not forget that there has been a continuous Jewish community in Israel long before the Arab conquest. They have now become Israeli citizens.
DRESS
The keffiyeh is now associated with the pro-Palestinian movement, but a variety of Middle Eastern cultures have long used headdresses; they are not unique to the Palestinians. The term “keffiyeh” itself means “relating to Kufa,” a city in modern-day Iraq. The black and white or red and white fishnet pattern associated with Palestinian nationalism is a British invention; Sir John Bagot Glubb used it to differentiate between his Palestinian Arab soldiers in black and white and his Jordanian Arab soldiers in red and white. The design rose to prominence again with Yasser Arafat in the 1960s.
The headdress some Jews wear today is not a keffiyeh. It’s a sudra, a traditional Jewish headdress with a history dating back thousands of years to the Biblical period and ancient Mesopotamia. It was worn like a turban or a headscarf and was of great spiritual importance at various points throughout history. It is even referenced in the Babylonian Talmud, written between the third and sixhth centuries.
Among Sepharadim, the sudra was worn over the shoulders like a scarf, while Ashkenazim wore it “coiled round the body like an Egyptian snake” or like the “kaftanis of the Tatars” when worn on the head. The sudra is likely the predecessor of the shtreimel, the fur hat worn by some Ashkenazi Jewish men, as Ashkenazi Jews in Europe eventually replaced the scarf with more weather-appropriate fur.
With the Arab conquest of the Middle East and North Africa, Jews became “dhimmis,” relegated to second class citizenship and a whole host of prohibitions. Among those prohibitions was the use of the sudra. Meanwhile, in Europe, Jews still used the traditional sudra well into the sixteenth century. In the Middle Ages, the use of turbans such as sudras were outlawed in Europe, resulting in its gradual decline among Ashkenazi Jewry.
MUSIC
Given that most Israeli Jews are of Mizrahi and Sephardic descent, it’s no wonder that much of Israeli music has similar sounds to Arab music.
Jewish music in the Middle East dates all the way back to Biblical times. The use of instruments such as the lyre, tambourine, trumpet, the cymbal, the pipe organ, the water organ, and of course, the shofar, is dated to Temple times, 3000 years ago. According to tradition, the tune used for Kol Nidre, the opening declaration right before the start of the Yom Kippur service, was used in the Temple period.
Mizrahi Jews brought with them the use of other Middle Eastern instruments, such as the oud, kanun, and darbouka.
In the Arab world, music was, at times, considered an undesirable industry. There is, for example, an Islamic debate as to whether music is haram or halal. Additionally, the more conservative elements of Islamic society disapproved of music as a profession. For this reason, many of the tunes associated with “Arab music” are actually Jewish in origin.
The first modern school of music in Iraq, for example, was founded by an Iraqi Jew, Ṣalāḥ al-Kuweiti, in the 1930s. Indeed, Ṣalāḥ and his brother Dāʾūd are considered the “fathers of modern Iraqi music.” When 850,000 Jews were driven out of the Arab world in 1948, Ṣalāḥ and Dāʾūd were among them. Like most Mizrahi Jews, they found a home in Israel. Naturally, they brought their music with them.
LANGUAGE
The accusation that Israelis appropriate language is twofold: (1) that we appropriate Arabic terms, such as “yallah,” and (2) that we have appropriated “Levantine” language when many of us have (re)Hebraized our names. I will address both points.
(1) accusing Israelis, particularly Mizrahi and Sephardic Israelis — that is, the majority of the Israeli population — of appropriating Arabic is akin to accusing Native Americans of appropriating English. The Arabization of the Middle East was the result of the forceful conquest and marginalization of Indigenous peoples. Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews were forced to speak Arabic; weaponizing that against Israelis now is audacious to say the least.
(2) early on in the Zionist movement, many Jews (re)Hebraized their names. This was not, contrary to the claims of antisemites, an attempt at feigning Indigeneity — so you agree that Hebrew culture is the Indigenous culture of the Land of Israel? — but rather, a clear act of decolonization.
Since ancient times, Jews have used the patronymic suffix “son/daughter [ben/bat] of [father’s name]” in place of a surname. Both Ashkenazim and Mizrahim were forced to adopt European and Arabic surnames, respectively; Persian Jews did not adopt Persian surnames until they were forced to do so by under the rule of Reza Shah (1921-1941). Exile was a deeply traumatic experience for Jews, so it’s no surprise that many Jews — particularly Ashkenazi Jews — chose to discard their forcefully imposed Diasporic/exilic surnames in favor of Hebrew names. This was a reclamation of identity and culture, not the appropriation of anyone else’s.
Finally, it’s important to note that language cross-pollination is a natural result of living in proximity. Just as Arabic has influenced Hebrew, so has Hebrew influenced Arabic, an example being the word “ameen,” coming from the Hebrew “amen.”
THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
Given the vast majority of the world uses the Jewish national charter — that is, the Tanakh — as its entire religious and moral foundation, I find it completely audacious to accuse Jews of appropriating comparatively minor things like food, dress, culture, and language.
Judaism is a closed ethnic religion. We do not proselytize. Conversion — the process of naturalization into the Jewish nation — is notoriously difficult. We wrote the Tanakh for us, not for anyone else, and we never consented to its appropriation for other purposes.
Since the earliest days of Christianity and Islam, Christians and Muslims weaponized their appropriation of our own book to justify our persecution. After the Roman Empire’s adoption of Christianity, the continued existence of Jews, and of Judaism by extension, challenged Christian supersessionism — the idea that Christianity “replaced” the Hebrew God’s special covenant with the Jewish people. Supersessionism also asserts that the Christian Church has “succeeded” ancient Israel as God’s “true Israel.” This was used as a justification to persecute us for thousands of years.
Likewise, Islam teaches that it is the final, most authentic iteration of Abrahamic monotheism, thus superseding both Judaism and Christianity. Some Muslims believe that the earlier scriptures — beginning with the Torah — have been corrupted. This concept is known as tahrif. In the earliest days of Islam, Muhammad proselytized to the Jewish tribes of the Arabian Peninsula by emphasizing Islam’s Biblical foundations. Most Jews rejected and resented Muhammad’s interpretation, even going so far as accusing him of appropriating historical Biblical figures in the Quran.
Over time, as Muhammad failed to convert most Jews, he grew increasingly hostile to Arabia’s Jewish population, accusing them of “intentionally concealing [the Tanakh’s] true meaning or of entirely misunderstanding it.”
ANTI-ZIONIST APPROPRIATION
Up until 1948, there was little question that Jews came from the Land of Israel — and that Arab culture and identity had been imported from Arabia. For example, in 1899, Yusuf al-Khalidi, the Arab mayor of Jerusalem, wrote to Theodor Herzl, the father of the modern political Zionist movement: “Who can challenge the rights of the Jews in Palestine? Good Lord, historically it is really your country.”
In 1925, the Islamic Waqf in charge of Temple Mount (known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif) wrote in its tourist guidebooks that the fact that Solomon’s Temple was located at Temple Mount was “beyond dispute.” In 1948, following Israel’s Declaration of Independence, the Waqf quietly revised its guidebooks to erase all references to the Jewish Temple. Again, this was done with the intent of negating Jewish ties to the land.
Even the current Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, has claimed that there was never a Jewish Temple but that there had been a mosque on Temple Mount since “the creation of the world.”
Websites such as Decolonize Palestine and renowned books such as “Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History” by Nur Masalha claim Jewish history as part of Palestinian heritage. But Jews are a closed ethnoreligion and tribe; our practices, culture, and history are not open to everyone else.
The fact is that the overwhelming majority of history in Israel and the Palestinian Territories is Jewish and Samaritan history. Palestinian identity, independent from a greater pan-Arab identity, is a very, very recent construct. The first Arab to identify as Palestinian was Khalil Beidas in 1898. Palestinian nationalism dates back to the 1920s, when Haj Amin Al-Husseini split off from other pan-Arab nationalists due to personal conflict. And Palestinian as a national ethos dates back to 1964.
Some Palestinians are genetic descendants of Jews and Samaritans, who were Arabized through a settler-colonial process known as Arabization. But Arab culture, identity, and the predominantly-practiced religion in the Palestinian Territories, Islam, are an imperial import to the land. To deny that Jews have Indigenous roots to the land, they claim the land’s Indigenous history as originally theirs.
WHAT THIS IS REALLY ABOUT
Jewish history is among the most meticulously recorded in the world. The ancient Israelites created the first Hebrew alphabet — known today as “Paleo-Hebrew” — some 3800 years ago, making it among the oldest alphabets in the world. We’ve been recording our history for nearly 4000 years now.
But it hasn’t been just Jews who’ve kept a record on our history; so has any other people that we’ve come in contact with, such as the Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, and more. The oldest ever outside mention of “Israel” comes from Egypt, in what is known as the Merneptah Stele, dating back to 1208 BCE, before the Kingdom of Israel was even established.
The erasure of Jewish history is antisemitic, full stop. It is especially so when our ancestors survived forced displacements, genocides, massacres, persecutions, statelessness, marginalization, and disenfranchisement over the course of thousands of years simply to preserve it. It’s an attack on our very identity and our very peoplehood.
The denial, revisionism, and erasure of extensively-recorded Jewish history does not help establish a Palestinian state. It does not help end the war in Gaza. It does not end the blockade, the checkpoints, or the military occupation of the West Bank. The only thing it does is delegitimize the very presence of Jews in the region.
Those who promote this narrative do so only to justify their goal of expelling Jews from our ancestral land. In depicting us and our culture as foreign interlopers to the land, they are thus laying the groundwork to justify our ethnic cleansing from it.
For a full bibliography of my sources, please head over to my Instagram and Patreon.